Journalist Jamal Khashoggi was tortured and dismembered over seven minutes while he was still alive, according to a Turkish source who heard an audio recording of the murder.
The Washington Post columnist was abducted Oct. 2 from the consul-general’s office at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and dragged into a study next door — and a witness downstairs heard horrendous screams, reported Middle East Eye.
“The consul himself was taken out of the room,” the source told the website. “There was no attempt to interrogate him. They had come to kill him.”
The screaming stopped when Khashoggi was injected with an unknown substance.
The head of forensic evidence in the Saudi general security department, Salah Muhammad al-Tubaigy, was among a 15-man squad who arrived in Turkey earlier that day by private jet.
The source said Tubaigy started to cut up Khashoggi’s body on a table in the study while the journalist was still alive — and the killing took seven minutes.
Tubaigy put on earphones and listened to music as he dismembered Khashoggi’s body with a bone saw, and he advised other squad members to do the same.
“When I do this job, I listen to music,” Tubaigy said on the recording. “You should do [that] too.”
Image by April Brady/Project on Middle East Democracy via Flickr and a CC license